India Through V.S.Naipaul's Eyes

The land of religious extremes and political upheavals, India is also the ancestral home of one of the greatest living writers, Sir V.S. Naipaul. In his books, India: A Wounded Civilization, An Area of Darkness and India: A Million Mutinies Now, Naipaul has documented the social and religious complexity of a country whose mythic attraction to a generation of hippies and soul seekers masked the dysfunctions of an ancient civilization unable to take its people into the modern age. He speaks to Rachael Kohn.

Transcript

Religion locks everything into place. The individual is never alone but is tied to a complex apparatus of rules, rituals and taboos. This is India, through V.S. Naipaul's eyes.

Hello, and welcome to a very special edition of The Spirit of Things, Radio National. I'm Rachael Kohn and my guest today is one of the world's greatest living writers, Sir V.S. Naipaul. Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul won the Booker Prize for his fiction, but he's written several non-fiction works on Africa, Islam, and India.

I recently visited India for the first time, and found myself in the poorest and reputedly most dangerous State of Bihar in north-east India. What I encountered there in the early rainy season was human degradation and suffering on a scale that simply defied any easy explanation, or remedy. For this kind of life was not confined only to the poor States, but was also there on the roadsides of Delhi, shanty towns that seemed to rise out of the mud.

After a week in Bihar, I left, and in the small airport in the town of Patna, I found a bookshop, and there, miraculously, was a slender volume called India: A Wounded Civilisation by V.S. Naipaul. In this collection of essays Naipaul seemed to anticipate all my thoughts and questions about this vast and complex land, which somehow has not pulled itself together into a function society.

In all his works on India, even those which only allude to India, such as his latest book, Half a Life, Naipaul reveals how the ancestral home is deep in the individual consciousness no matter how far and wide one travels.

Sir Vidia began his writing career in a suitcase, as it were, when as the grandson of Indian immigrants in Trinidad, he embarked on his first trip to India. He already had intimations of what he would find there.

In Trinidad, in the late '30s and early '40s, I used to see poor Indian people sleeping in the squares of Port of Spain. These people were peasant emigrants from India; they had served out their indentures 20 years or so before, but had not been given their passages back to India, and had then become destitute, abandoned by everybody.

In the colonial city they were further isolated by their language; and they were to live on the streets until they died out. The idea came to me, when I was quite young, seeing those destitutes, that we were people with no one to appeal to. We had been transported out of the abjectness of India, and were without representation. The idea of the external enemy wasn't enough to explain what had happened to us.

I found myself at an early age looking inwards, and wondering whether the culture, the difficult but personal religion, the taboos, the social ideas, which in one way supported and enriched some of us, and gave us solidity, wasn't perhaps the very thing that had exposed us to defeat.

India: A Million Mutinies Now

Rachael Kohn: When did you first have an inkling that you wanted to visit and document the land of your forefathers?

V.S. Naipaul: I suppose since I became a writer, when I became a writer, I always wanted to do it, and it seemed to me natural, some of it had to be done, and as soon as I could do it, I went out to do it. I was 29. I invested everything I had in that first journey. I was going to drive to India, I even went and bought the Volkswagen mini-bus, I was even talking with them about the colour of the little plastic plates they fitted those things up with in 1961/62, but I couldn't get the insurance, so that had to be abandoned. But I'm just telling you how important it was. I gave everything I had, I had very little money, but all of it went onto this idea of a year in India.

Rachael Kohn: When you grew up in Trinidad did your parents tell you stories about India, that they had heard from their parents?

V.S. Naipaul: No. I suppose my parents were born in Trinidad and their parents were the people who had come from India, and I think we were not that kind of people who would tell one another stories or who would try to analyse the past. I think we were still, when I was growing up, people who were pretending that we were carrying on living on the Gangetic Plain in eastern Uttar Pradesh. I don't think we had been able to step backwards, to consider the experience.

So there were no stories. I was not able to ask any questions. Great shame, because you see a whole section of my ancestry has been lost to me. I don't know who my father's grandfather was, and I don't know where they came from. I know that they came from Nepal, but that's as far as it gets.

Rachael Kohn: So your investigations in India never uncovered those personal ancestral lines?

V.S. Naipaul: Only on my mother's side, but we always knew that, but we had nothing to go on, no names, nothing, a great mystery. So it's hanging in the air and I suppose it's very disconcerting to look back and it just falls away, there's no past.

Rachael Kohn: Can I ask you just before we get into that world that you stepped into and documented, back home in Trinidad were you a religious family, did you come from a religious family?

V.S. Naipaul: My mother's family were religious, but not in the way that I liked. They were great people for the rituals and the ceremonies; I didn't find that attractive. I really miraculously had no faith at all, was born without faith and have continued to be without faith. My father was much more philosophical, and he despised, was angered by the excesses of ritual, and I suppose I allowed myself to be influenced by that, but I think it was also my nature. I have no religious sense within me.

Rachael Kohn: And yet you have such an inquiring mind, I think you've probably echoed your father's sentiments when you said about ritual that it is a display, a show, and its hallmark is that very often one doesn't actually know the meaning of the words one is incanting or saying.

V.S. Naipaul: You know this is true of most religions. If you go right back to Roman religion, the religion of ancient Rome, many of their customs were mysterious even to them. They did them because they were always there, and I was talking, I've got a friend who is a Parsi, one of the group of people who left Iran after the Muslim conquest, and came to India, many of their customs have this mythical, meaningless quality, they're just part of people's identity.

Rachael Kohn: Well when you went to India it was something of a shock, you weren't prepared for what you saw. Was it the poverty that preoccupied you, or was it the religion?

V.S. Naipaul: I think it was the general awfulness, beginning with the poverty. But the poverty was not a surprise.

I think we all knew that we had come from a very poor country and that we had migrated there, because of the wretchedness of conditions in India in the 1880s when there were famines. I don't know why there should have been famines in India in the 1880s, or why it was so specially wretched, but one relation of mine went back to India to visit my mother's family's ancestral village. When this person came back, he said, 'If my grandfather or my father had to indenture himself 20 times to get away from that, it would have been well worth doing', such was the shock he felt on seeing what he did see. And these were my nerves on going to India, it was a land of an extraordinary wretchedness from which we had fled.

We were not middle-class people going to university in England and as it were lying about ourselves, talking about our social standing, we were peasantry and we knew that it had been awful, and that was the India that I was very nervous of finding, and it was the India I'm afraid I horribly found.

Rachael Kohn: Well you've certainly written in many ways about the cultural, as opposed to purely economic sources of that poverty, and in particular the ideal of holy poverty. How would you describe its influence on the Indian psyche and society generally?

V.S. Naipaul: I think I would like to go back just a little bit to the wretchedness of India, and to talk about what might have caused it, that people behave as though it was always there, it was an eternal. I don't think it was an eternal.

India was destroyed by the Muslim invaders, they ruled it severely and ravaged it for five to six centuries and they left nothing behind. They didn't build a school, no institutions, so that was the cause of the poverty, that utter wretchedness where people had no faith in institutions, had no-one to appeal to ever, produced this idea of holy poverty. I think we have to understand that.

Rachael Kohn: So the religious ideals grew out of a social and political context, are you saying?

V.S. Naipaul: I think so, yes, grew out of wretchedness, grew out of defeat, and it's not beautiful at all, and as India gets richer today, people's idea of what is owed to them by the world, or what they owe themselves, those ideas are steadily rising. It's not an eternal this idea of holy poverty.

I've got two drawings of aesthetics, one I would say about 1600-and-something, Moghul period, and clearly this aesthetic who is so bony that the Moghul artist makes a pattern of his bones, this man is a madman, he's mad with distress. And there's another drawing, 1820, done for a British collector, East India Company servant, and again there is this same thing in the face, the aesthetic who is almost all nude, his possessions in a little bundle, and he's a Muslim aesthetic. His eyes and his face, they are the face of someone absolutely distraught. So the idea of the aesthetic has this element of complete despair, and wretchedness.

Rachael Kohn: How is it that that particular image of the aesthetic, living in holy poverty, took such hold, and I think of Gandhi for example, he certainly used that idea to his advantage.

V.S. Naipaul: He used the idea because he didn't know anything else, and he moved in a particular way, he moved out of his own historical blindness to great passion. But Mr Nehru said on one occasion, 'One of the troubles in India was that people could deify poverty' and they certainly did this. In 1971 there was a general election. I went to Rajistan State to follow it in one constituency, and I travelled around with one of the men who called himself a Gandhian, and he was appalled to find water, piped water, being taken to the villages. He thought it was going to demoralise people, he talked about what would happen to the Indian Gandhi. We were dealing then with people who were so depressed they could not understand what rubbish they were talking.

Rachael Kohn: But indeed it conforms to a kind of simple, idyllic notion of what was possible, and I'm thinking of how you have characterised Gandhi as someone who did not actually see very clearly the things around him. When he went to London for example, he talks about it as an internal experience, it's an interior account.

V.S. Naipaul: It's a very simple internal experience. He will say, and I think this actually records his words, 'We got to Southampton as a remember, on a Saturday.' There is no picture of Southampton, and the Saturday is important, because he couldn't get at his clothes for landing.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, he was fastidious about how he wanted to appear.

V.S. Naipaul: No I don't think he was fastidious, it was just a way of not experiencing the world, and I will try to define this way of not experiencing.

One way is to be able to step back and to consider what's happening, and you make a comment. You can say, 'I think a storm is coming up, I think it's going to rain. Oh, I think it's raining.' The other way is to say, 'I think I'm getting wet.' It doesn't make the larger point, and Gandhi is very much the man making that tiny point, 'I think I'm getting wet', and there is not a whisper in his account of England, of any of the plays that were there, any of the writing that was there, there's only an account of a meeting with Cardinal Manning, who had just dealt with the dock strike. It was not a way of seeing the world at all.

Rachael Kohn: And yet it has a deeply Indian religious basis in the notion that the self is where God resides and therefore documenting the self and one's feelings.

V.S. Naipaul: I think all of this is said, but you see I reject all of this. I feel all of this tells people that they should be defeated again, it's good for them to live with defeat, and that somehow beauty comes out of defeat. I don't think beauty comes out of defeat, I think the Indian wretchedness comes out of the Indian defeat, and this idea of experiencing is utterly wrong. I don't think the Sanskrit texts pre the Muslim conquest, dealt in this kind of negation. I think this negation has come with the years of squalor and defeat.

Rachael Kohn: Well the idea of the importance of the self and the interior world certainly took hold in the West in the '60s, it became very popular with the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. You were in India at that time...

V.S. Naipaul: Sixty-two, I was in India in '62, and probably the Beatles, they probably went a little later than that.

Rachael Kohn: You must have had some thoughts about this Western love affair.

V.S. Naipaul: It wasn't a love affair, it was slumming, and it remains slumming.

Rachael Kohn: The whole hippie experience in India?

V.S. Naipaul: It's slumming, and it's connected now with drugs and it's made some places in the Himalayas, rather disagreeable places and I think they should be cleaned up.

A writer I knew who loved India, and then he went to South America, and he was shocked by what he saw in South America, for this reason: He said he went there on the streets of Bogotá, the capital, there were children begging, and these children could have been like his own sons. The Indian children didn't affect him in that way, they were part of the beauty of India. I'm talking about this awful attitude to poor old India, which I do not find admirable.

Rachael Kohn: Sir Vidia Naipaul is my guest on The Spirit of Things, Radio National, where the topic is India, the home of his forebears.

It's a land that has often been romanticised by the West, and by Indians themselves, especially as a reaction to the Muslim conquests from 1000 AD onwards. But the British India of E.M. Forster and its dying embers in the work of Somerset Maugham, has given way to a modern post-independent India. In the urban centres Indians have embraced modernity, but its effects are often as ugly as they are confusing, as V.S. Naipaul writes.

At dinner that evening, high up in one of those towers, a journalist touched the subject of identity. 'Indian' was a word that was now without meaning, he said. He himself, he was in his thirties, of the post-Independence generation, no longer knew who he was. He no longer knew the Hindu gods.

His grandmother, visiting Khajuraho or some other famous temple, would immediately be in tune with what she saw; she wouldn't need to be told about the significance of the carvings. He was like a tourist; he saw only an architectural monument. He had lost the key to a whole world of belief and feeling, and was cut off from his past.

It explained his frenzy. His idea of India was one in which India couldn't be accommodated. It was an idea of India which, for all its seeming largeness, only answered a personal need: the need, in spite of the mess of India, to be Indian, to belong to an established country with an established past. And the journalist was insecure. As an Indian he was not yet secure enough to think of Indian identity as something dynamic, something that could incorporate the millions on the move, the corrupters of the cities.

For the journalist, though he was an economist and had travelled, and was professionally concerned with development and change, Indian identity was not something developing or changing but something fixed, an idealisation of his own background, the past he felt he had just lost. Identity was related to a set of beliefs and rituals, a knowledge of the gods, a code, an entire civilisation.

The loss of the past meant the loss of that civilisation, the loss of a fundamental idea of India, and the loss therefore, to a nationalist-minded man, of a motive for action. It was part of the feeling of purposelessness of which many Indians spoke, part of the longing for Gandhian days, when the idea of India was real and seemed full of promise, and the 'moral issues' clear.

But it was a middle-class burden, the burden of those whose nationalism, after the years of subjection, required them to have an idea of India. Lower down, in the chawls and the squatters' settlements of the city, among the dispossessed, needs were more elemental: food, shelter, water, a latrine. Identity there was no problem; it was a discovery.

India: A Wounded Civilisation

Rachael Kohn: Well a lot has changed in recent years, particularly India's leap into modernity and the computer revolution. Does modern India still look to those ideals of holy poverty, the Sadhus, the aesthetics, as ideals or as models?

V.S. Naipaul: There will always be Sadhus in India, there'll always be that kind of element in the population who wish to drop out of the very tight caste and family structure, and wish to be free in that way.

With this amazing revolution in India, which has been, you know, the British began it by giving education at institutions and independent India has fostered it and taken it on very far indeed, so expectations have begun to rise, and people's idea of what the world should give them. They're also changing. The idea of the Sadhus as I said, is something else. At the end of your life when you have been in the world, you might then withdraw, which we all feel sometimes that it's time to withdraw, to pack up one's boots, to retire, I don't think it's profounder than that, really.

Rachael Kohn: Well certainly one of the expectations that has risen in modern India is amongst the young people who want to choose their own brides and grooms for example, they want to choose their own husbands and wives. Now this seems to be one of the ways in which modernisation really has very strong personal ramifications, where whole families are thrown into grief over this new-found freedom.

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, and the people who have the freedom to choose are also going to be thrown into grief, because when you move from this ritualised idea, family life, ritualised marriage, ritualised married life, there's no room for sexual self-indulgence, sexual adventure, when you move from that to being an individual as you think, in a freer country, freer society and you begin to look for sexual gratification, then another kind of darkness opens to you, it's the darkness of lack of fulfilment, failure, not knowing how to seduce, not knowing literally, how to talk to a girl.

I talked to a guerrilla, he was a boy from a village in the Punjab, and this idea of sexual inadequacy, this idea of not knowing how to talk to a girl in the university, not knowing the language, not having the culture as he felt, and the poor man being driven to reading Mills and Boon novels to get to this person.

Rachael Kohn: And not the Karma Sutra?

V.S. Naipaul: No, the Karma Sutra is...

Rachael Kohn: It's for real professionals.

V.S. Naipaul: The Karma Sutra is part of this world that was destroyed, part of this great Sanskrit world that was destroyed by the invaders, and it's a kind of curious dead Aristotelian text, and probably had value as part of that Sanskrit culture 1000 AD, but I don't think it's a good guide now.

I think Mills and Boon for this young man will probably be better, but what aridity it opens up to him. So the idea of freedom, people choosing their own brides, it sounds OK but there is another side to it. Probably all human life has some element of dissatisfaction and incompleteness.

Rachael Kohn: Well apart from the sexual dissatisfaction and confusion, there's also the challenging and the breaking apart of the sacred caste system in which Brahmin men for example fall in love with someone below their caste. Now this is really where the social and the personal collide. In your view, is the caste system a kind of neutered violence throughout Indian society?

V.S. Naipaul: It might do at some levels and at some places, but I think please remember that in a world where there are no institutions and where until recently you had no legislators of your own choosing, the caste system was your group. It was almost literally your friendly society and you couldn't do without it, and earlier in the last century there was a reforming movement in India called the Brotherhood, which was going to reform Hinduism and get rid of the caste idea and things like that.

Not understanding this aspect of the caste system, the idea of the friendly society, the protecting society, and it failed for that reason. People couldn't get brides, they couldn't get husbands, they couldn't move out in the big world. It's not always violence, it probably is violence in Bihar, it probably is violence among various castes, and please remember that sometimes the violence is between the middle castes, one against the other, it's not this crude thing about the upper and the lower, it's infinitely varied.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, within any caste there are a number of different possible roles, or kinds of work that one can take that are proscribed.

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, but you see what happens, that was true in a pastoral society but in society becoming rapidly urban or industrial, that is no longer true, everybody is doing a new kind of job now.

Rachael Kohn: Yes. Well there certainly have been violent responses to the social order, the sacred social order of the caste, and you've mentioned the brotherhood, and I'm also thinking of your account of Periyar the hero of the south, the Tamils. Now he established these self respect marriages; are they still practiced?

V.S. Naipaul: I think the Periyar group have come to such political power.

Rachael Kohn: In Madras, isn't it?

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, Tamil Nadu, you know they run the country, the run the State, various aspects of them. I don't think they need that any longer, that was a protest, that was the protest aspect. But the Brahmins have been overthrown in the south, the Brahmins have migrated, many have gone to the United States, probably there might be some here in Australia, I don't know.

So there is another way of understanding the caste war. The tables have been turned to some extent, in independent India, with democratic institutions and people voting and choosing their own legislators, you know. It's a great change, the migrations of the Brahmins, because they were a learned caste, and India very much needed their talent.

Rachael Kohn: Yes it's interesting that even the attempts of the Brahmins to reform themselves really wasn't enough for those who took up the socialist cause in the '70s, I believe the Naxalites and felt that socialism and the eradication of this religious rigidity would save India.

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, that Naxalite thing ended in just murder and although there are little groups here and there still practising this nihilism.Rachael Kohn: It certainly was a very violent movement.

V.S. Naipaul: It was violent, but contained. It wasn't taking anybody anywhere, and yet we mustn't dismiss it altogether because I think it was part of, to use a word from another continent, it was part of the development of consciousness among people who'd had no voice for so long, and it was part of growth, intellectual growth, social growth.

Rachael Kohn: Well do you think that the caste system of India is there to stay in the consciousness?

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, I think very few people can get out of it, very few people have the talent in a brutally simply way, to find their own husbands and to live in their own little social groups. Very few people can do it. The caste system, that friendly society which provides people with every kind of cushion, in bad times, will be around for most people in India.

Rachael Kohn: Well Westerners used to go to India searching out simplicity, the kind they might have inferred from Gandhi's ideology. Today I wonder whether they're attracted by the opposite, India's complexity?

V.S. Naipaul: I would like to, as it were, deal with that in a slightly oblique way. I would like to say that the people going to India for simplicity, in the old days, were fooling themselves. The simplicity appealed to them because they were people who had no sense of community at home, who just moved between office and home, office and home, whose lives in fact had been so simplified by the industrial society that they wished to go to a more elemental complexity, making your own bread, you know, instead of buying it, making it, and grinding your own wheat to make the flour. We are looking really, when we talk of simplicity, we want the simple life, we want the more elemental complex life.

Rachael Kohn: Well does that complexity attract you over and over again, because you have gone back to India and written several times about it?

V.S. Naipaul: Well I was interested in India because, and I still am, because of my concern, I hate distress, I hate poverty, and I wish to see it alleviated, it can't disappear unfortunately, but I wish to see it alleviated, that's what I go back to look for, I look for signs of that.

Rachael Kohn: V.S. Naipaul looking for the signs of Indian self help and self renewal.

Amongst the chawls, the substandard accommodation blocks for factory labour, V.S. Naipaul found those signs of self help and renewal in the Shiv Sena Movement. Taking their name from a 17th century guerrilla leader, Shivaji, who fought against the Moghul Empire, these neo-warriors are on the march, not for India itself, but for their own betterment in the State of Maharashtra and in the city of Bombay.

MUSIC

Identity was what the young men of the Sena were reaching out to, with the simplicities of their politics and their hero figures (the 17th century Shivaji, warrior chieftain turned to war-god, the 20th century Dr Ambedkar, untouchable now only in his sanctity.)

For the Sena men, and the people they led, the world was new; they saw themselves at the beginning of things, unaccommodated men making a claim on their land for the first time, and out of chaos evolving their own philosophy of community and self-help. For them the past was dead, they had left it behind in the villages.

Rachael Kohn: Well you've certainly documented layers and layers of the complexity of Indian society, but do you still encounter Indians who romanticise the great civilisation of the past, who look to the past for the future?

V.S. Naipaul: No, I think that was part of the independence movement, when without knowledge, people thought that they had a great civilisation, and they were not able to understand why it was no longer around them. They were not able to understand the centuries of defeat they had gone through, and so they talked about the great civilisation without knowing what they were talking about. They had no idea about the art of Indian sculpture, they couldn't deal with it, they couldn't place it. No history. So it was just something to talk about.

Rachael Kohn: Mythologised.

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, I remember Gandhi himself did it in his first book which he wrote when he was in South Africa and published in South Africa called 'Indian Home Rule' on the basis of Irish Home Rule at the time. He really spoke about India's ancient culture and Gandhi you know was not an educated man, he knew nothing of the history of India, no gift of inquiry, no gift of understanding experience, or being able to look, he just had this idea, this gut feeling about the glory of India, the ancient civilisation.

In 1942 at the height of the Quit India movement, just a few years before India became independent, somebody saw a book beside the Mahatma, I think it was called 'How Green was my Valley', which was a best-seller about a Welsh mining town.

Rachael Kohn: That's right, and a great film.

V.S. Naipaul: And a great film, yes.

Rachael Kohn: Well in your recent book, Half a Life, you describe the protagonist in similar terms to Gandhi, as a man who walked without seeing, a habit he got from his father. But he realises that he must learn about history, and he must have a sense of time. Does this describe you, you life's work?

V.S. Naipaul: No. I've always had the seeing thing, I grew up in another part of the world, and this understanding of the Mahatma has, as it were, come to me through study. When I wrote my books about India I studied Mahatma's writing and Indian writing, and I understood this way of perceiving. I myself never had it. Because I never had it, I was able to study it. It's like because I have no religion or no faith, I study other people's religion, I'm not prejudiced.

Rachael Kohn: Yes. Well you're certainly one of the most unusual writers today, because you're a cultural and religious critic. Now many people today champion the blending of cultures and the religions of far-off places and far-off peoples, and yet you remain a critical observer. Is this just an anti-religious streak or are you not very optimistic about the multicultural, multi religious society today that has determined policy, and that we're trying to live out?

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, I think the multicultural idea which comes from the United States, is being fostered by Islamic groups, and I think it's extremely dangerous. I think one aspect of it.

Of course there are many others, I'm just talking about this thing which says that women must cover themselves up, although they might wish to come and live in your country, they must cover themselves up, and I think that's so dangerous, because I think we should be extending the hand to these people who come from oppressive regimes, and the oppressive faith of converted people, their faith is an oppressive faith, it's a faith which hates humanity and the converted people begin in Iran, they come all the way down to Indonesia, and to talk about multiculturalism, about the converted people who have destroyed their own civilisations, who have no time for their own culture, is absurd.

It can't be countenanced, because you'd say, 'You destroy Buddhism in Afghanistan, you destroy Hindusim and Buddhism in Pakistan, you destroy the past in Iran, how can you claim my tolerance for your intolerance?' I think there must be an intellectual confrontation, instead of this glib multi-culti talk.

Rachael Kohn: Multi-culti. Sir Vidia, I wonder if that can also be laid at the feet of other missionary traditions. I mean isn't it always the case when a tradition feels compelled to share its truth, its revelation with other peoples, that this will inevitably happen, that a previous culture or tradition will be repressed?

V.S. Naipaul: Now I think you're being very general. I'm talking about something very specific. You're talking about the missionary thing, and that word will let the listener believe that Christianity is missionary and they have missionaries, and that you have Islamic missionaries, and they're the same thing. I don't think the people who become Christians are required to discard their history. I don't think they're required to destroy their past.

I think in our modern world we cherish the past, we wish to find out more and more about the past. To destroy the sites of the world, it happened in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, is really to wound us all. It is just a missionary act and the people there must learn to hate the past. It's not so, Islam makes especially heavy demands on its converts. They have to shed their past, and the neurosis is much worse than the colonial neurosis, that people through political days.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, I want to ask you about that because you haven't mentioned the British presence in India. Now in your view, was that a good or a bad thing for Indian civilisation?

V.S. Naipaul: It was an excellent thing. Benign, not consciously, not deliberately, but the British were the first to institutions, courts, property rights, law, universities, schools, extraordinary achievement.

Rachael Kohn: It certainly was taken up very quickly.

V.S. Naipaul: And India, which has really been trampled into the dust by the centuries of illiterate brutal conquerors, religious fanatics, was able to pick itself up very slowly. It's still not picked itself up completely, but I think the British contribution really was quite benign. It's very extraordinary because England itself is such a cultural mess these days, but in India their contribution was benign.

Rachael Kohn: Well you live in the beautiful and benign area of Wiltshire in England.

V.S. Naipaul: Dangerous, noisy, overrun with...

Rachael Kohn: Very close to the Cotswolds though.

V.S. Naipaul: Yes but the Cotswolds are nicer because I'm close to an air base. I thought they were going to close it down at the end of the Cold War, but I think just for sport they're becoming very active again, and many houses are going up. It's changing.

Rachael Kohn: Over-population.

V.S. Naipaul: No it's not over-population, it's a shift of population in the south, and civil servants say 'We need five million more houses'. They don't tell anybody how they arrive at these figures. The developers are delighted to build five million houses.

Rachael Kohn: Yes and they're determined to get a profit for it.

V.S. Naipaul: They're determined to do that and we are living in the middle of that now.

Rachael Kohn: Now recently there have been race riots in England. What's been your comment on that?

V.S. Naipaul: I haven't made any comment on it at all.

I always was aware that this immigration, some percentage of it quite illegal, and this multicultural approach to immigration, 'Please we want your laws, but when we come in and use your laws to settle here, may we go back to our old ways, may we veil our women, may we remain with our old customs which have kept us down?' And I think a lot of what is happening is a reaction to that. It's working two ways.

There are the children of the migrants who have become fundamentalists, and some in fact have become terrorists in foreign lands. They're often referred to in the news as British or Britons, you know, in Yemen and places like that. Or in other places, Bosnia and Kashmir and places like that. So there is that, and there is the resentment of people who are not settling in among the local people. I don't see how it can be solved. I see it's an intractable problem.

MUSIC

A memory came to me of something that had happened at home, in the ashram, about 25 years before. I would have been about ten. A merchant of the town came to see my father. This merchant was rich and gave to religious charities, but people were nervous of him because he was said to be shameless in his private life. I didn't know what that meant but, together with the revolutionary teaching of my mother's uncle, it tainted the man and his riches for me.

The merchant must have reached some crisis in his life, and, as a devout man, he had come to my father for advice and comfort. After the usual salutations and small talk, the merchant said, 'Master, I find myself in a difficult situation.' The merchant paused, my father waited. The merchant said, 'Master, I am like King Dasaratha.' Dasaratha was a sacred name, he was the ruler of the ancient kingdom of Kosala, and the father of the hero-divinity, Rama. The merchant smiled, pleased at what he had said, pleased at easing himself with piety into his story; but my father was not pleased at all.

He said in his severe way, 'How are you like King Dasaratha?' The merchant should have been warned by my father's tone, but he continued to smile and said, 'Perhaps I am not quite like Dasaratha. He had three wives. I have two. And that, Master, is at the root of my troubles.'

He was not allowed to say any more. My father said, 'How dare you compare yourself to gods? Dasaratha was a man of honour. His reign was of unparalleled righteousness. His later life was a life of sacrifice. How dare you compare yourself and your squalid bazaar lusts with such a man? If I were not a man of peace I would have you whipped out of my ashram.'

The episode added to my father's reputation, and when, as now happened, we children found out about the shamelessness of the merchant's life, we were as appalled as my father. To have two wives and two families was to violate nature. To duplicate arrangements and affections was to be perpetually false. It was to dishonour everyone, it was to leave everyone standing in quicksand.

That was how it had looked to me when I was ten.

Half a Life

Rachael Kohn: That was Sir V.S. Naipaul, reading from his works and speaking to me on his first visit to Australia.

His views on Islam are controversial, and have elicited strong reactions from writers like Edward Said. But as a writer with an eye for social realism, and an appreciation for Western style liberal humanism, Naipaul is openly critical of all systems, which he feels strangle human freedom of thought an inquiry. Hinduism as we've seen, does not escape his critical scrutiny.

India through V.S. Naipaul's Eyes was produced by me and Geoff Wood with technical production by Roi Huberman.

For those of you hooked on Naipaul you can hear more from him on Radio National next Sunday. Recorded at the Melbourne Town Hall in front of a live audience, V.S. Naipaul is in conversation with Robert Dessaix. I'm told that it's the first time he's ever agreed to be interviewed in a public setting. That's on Books and Writing next Sunday.

In the meantime, I'll talk to you next week on The Spirit of Things. Till then, so long from me, Rachael Kohn.

Guests

V.S.Naipaul

was born in Trinidad in 1932. Since he starting writing in 1954 he has won many prizes, including the Booker Prize for his novel, In a Free State, 1971.